Connections

Since their creation a century and a half ago, the free, common
schools have rarely been free of controversy and often have been
objects of parental suspicion and distrust. Battles over the state's
authority to require communities to establish public schools and compel
children to attend them raged across the land during the first half of
the 19th century. Angry opponents argued that education was not a
proper function of government and that it was an intrusion into the
domain of parents. They feared the secularizing influence of schools
that were largely expected to provide religious and moral instruction.
And they objected to paying higher taxes to finance education.

As three of this month's feature stories indicate, these issues
remain with us; many parents still distrust public schools. In the most
extreme example, "Whose Kids Are They, Anyway?,'' Drew Lindsay writes
about a growing parents' rights movement that is challenging public
schools in courts and statehouses across the country. The movement is
"fueled by shocking--often dubious--stories of schools passing out
condoms like candy, levitating and hypnotizing kids, and disrupting
households with Gestapo-like investigations thinly disguised as abuse
inquiries.''

Parents' rights advocates are lobbying state legislatures and
working for passage of the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act in
the U.S. Congress--a bill that opponents argue could give parents
authority to dictate curriculum, set graduation requirements, and
choose the books that students use.

Instead of fighting to change public schools, an increasing number
of parentsare simply refusing to enroll their children in them.
Estimates of the number of young people being educated at home range
from 500,000 to 1 million. The reasons parents keep their children out
of public school vary, but one that nearly all share is the belief that
schooling at home will be far better for them than attending
"government'' schools.

In "Homegrown Learning,'' David Hill writes about a small community
in Northern California with a disproportionately high percentage of
homeschoolers, where the public school district has made extraordinary
efforts to accommodate dissatisfied parents and win their trust. The
district has created a home study program that combines homeschooling
with regular classroom instruction several days a week. The
superintendent, expressing an unusually enlightened point of view, says
simply: "We've got a lot of variety in this area, so our school
district has an amazing range of points of views, lifestyles, and
expectations. Which makes things like the home study program critical.
You couldn't serve this community properly without that kind of
option.''

Even when schools try to improve with new pedagogies and new
teaching strategies, they get into trouble. In "Unconventional
Wisdom,'' Debra Viadero profiles prominent African-American researcher
and author Lisa Delpit, who "is best known for the philosophical bombs
she has lobbed at some of contemporary education's most sacred cows.''
In short, she has charged that many of the public schools' more
progressive programs can be harmful to poor and minority children.
These programs may work for some students, perhaps most, Delpit says,
but they don't work for everybody.

It would be easy--and perhaps justifiable in some cases--to dismiss
these critics as fringe groups who want public schools remade in their
own image. But these vocal critics may be only the tip of the iceberg
if opinion surveys are to be believed. Many parents are uneasy about
their schools and wish they were better but don't know what to do. That
fact, along with parents' prolonged and persistent doubts about
schools, should give us pause. If nothing else, it should prompt
educators and policymakers to ask what it is about public education
that generates such distrust.

For much of its history, public education has made few allowances
for individual differences. Government bureaucracies rarely do; as a
matter of policy, they aspire to treat everyone the same way. Faced
with the subtle and complex challenge of opening young minds and coping
with enormous personal diversity, public schools too often have treated
all children in the same way. "The difficulty,'' writes Lisa Delpit,
"is that all children don't have exactly the same needs.''

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